Also IIRC it is only the very first user that has this privilege by default. For extra users I think you'll have to explicitly enable it when you create the account (or at a later stage.)
"you should never run anything as root" yet on ubuntu everything as good as runs as root by default.
even windows ussually has a seperate password to create user accounts, but with ubuntu make the mistake of leaving your machine unlocked and unattended and any little script kiddy can own your machine in fractions of a second. worse even than windows, because they get remote access by default.
I understand why they did it. but if they are making those kind of changes I dont have the energy to track down what other things they "broke" to favor some (what i consider to be) misguided idea of useability over security.
you know, stuff like this
http://askubuntu.com/questions/153933/no-password-prompt-at-...
Wrong, I'd say. Only if you or the IT department specifically set it up that way.
Also, again IIRC but I think you have to type password the first time you use sudo un a session on desktop Ubuntu (or after 15 minutes).
which is also my experience.
having plenty of experience getting red hat fedora and centos set up just the way i like, i decided very quickly even getting ubuntu "safe" was more learning curve than reward.
you cant even copy files to a usb stick because mounting it requires a password.
that is very different to making the machine yours via remote access.
and very very different than letting browser plugins create user accounts that can be accessed remotely (that have root access by default). then theres the fact that selinux seems to be a right state on ubuntu
plus what everybody else said. basically put there are several nicer and more secure distributions of linux i would choose before ubuntu.